The Province of Freetown

While Smeathman busied himself with physical arrangements and recruitment, it fell to Granville Sharp to write a plan of government. Representatives of the blacks approved the result before embarkation. Several sought Sharp’s advice before signing to go. Some said that they knew the Sierra Leone area, and they assured him that there was good, unoccupied woodland available there.³⁰ The utopian society Sharp proposed for the black settlers will be studied later. In the summer of 1786 the immediate task was to organize the departures. It began happily enough. Even before his memorial went to the Treasury, Smeathman had 130 signatures, and officials contemplated providing for around 200. There was reason to think more would respond....Suddenly, Smeathman died from a “putrid fever” on July 1, 1786. By now 400 men and women were committed to sail. On July 15 their corporals told the committee that the only man who could command the same confidence among them as Smeathman was his clerk, Joseph Irwin, who had never seen Africa. Hanway, exhibiting hitherto concealed suspicions of Smeathman’s idea of redeeming (that is, buying the freedom of) slaves to cultivate cotton and rice, charged that the dead leader had intended “trafficking in Men." There was no other qualified person to take them to Africa, and New Brunswick was now the committee’s choice. Not many weeks earlier, it had been Hanway who harangued them to forget their own doubts about establishing a free settlement in a slave-trade area. They had appeared convinced. Now they were offered New Brunswick. Only sixty-seven agreed to go, and five of them later retracted. They were totally averse to such alternatives as the Bahamas and Gambia, proposed by shipping interests. Their spokesmen held fast to the Smeathman plan, quoting a native, now living in London, who had told them that the Africans at Sierra Leone were “fond of the English & would receive them joyfully.”
   Wearied by the lengthy business, the committe agreed on August 4, 1786, to recommend finally to the Treasury that the blacks go to Sierra Leone. A contract with a shipping firm was arranged at £8.14.0 per person.³⁶
   A notion grew up in America that the first Sierra Leone settlers were sent from London against their will. There was indeed, at the end, strong pressure on those who had signified an interest and then withdrew. Their shore allowances were stopped, and they were threatened with prison if found begging. But the public controversy that developed between the blacks and their sponsors during their last months in England contributed more than anything else to the unhappy image which the project gained in some quarters abroad.
...Captain Thompson’s final embarkation list shows that 411 persons sailed from Plymouth. Sierra Leone chronicles usually relate that among them were 60 to 70 white women prostitutes collected as companions for unmarried blacks. This is based entirely on the story told to Anna Maria Falconbridge in 1791. She found among the surviving first settlers in Sierra Leone several white women, one of whom told her that more than 100 women, mostly streetwalkers, had been made drunk at Wapping, tricked onto the ships and married to blacks they had never seen before. From then until sailing day, they had been kept “amused and buoyed up by a prodigality of fair promises, and great expectations.” Although she said others corroborated this report, Mrs. Falconbridge could scarcely believe it⁵⁸ and time has not made it more credible. Nothing can be found in the records. To carry out such a gambit, with or without the connivance of the eminently respectable committee, would have risked exposure in the rumor-mongering London press The women could not have been concealed...
   What may be overlooked is that interracial marriages were not uncommon then. Single men predominated in the black population, and if they were to enjoy female companionship, they had to find it in the white race whatever their preference. Both Vassa and Stewart married white women, as did several of the loyal blacks whose records are known. On the whole, blacks were popular among the whites with whom they lived and worked, and not just in the “lower orders.”...
   The status of each passenger was indicated, moreover, in the embarkation list Gustavus Vassa drew up at Portsmouth in February, 1787. He named seventy-five white women, four of whom were wives and one a sister-in-law of whites who were also sailing, and seven of whom were “wanting to be married.” The other sixty-three were married to black emigrants. Between then and the April departure eighteen of the white women disappeared from the roll (some may have died) and eleven new names were added, although the race of nine is not given. With discharges and runaways accounted for, a maximum of fifty-nine white women—wives—could have sailed for Sierra Leone...
...Regrettably, the spirit of high adventure which seemed to permeate the enterprise in the early summer of 1786 had changed by April, 1787, to a sour welter of charges and countercharges. With the deaths of Smeathman and Hanway, the project had lost its visionaries. There was still Granville Sharp, but he had no official standing. The experiment fell into the hands of men with a more bureaucratic cast of mind, who, in their impatience to see it carried out, did not find the time or see the need to communicate fully with the colonists. John Stewart (Ottobah Cugoano), watching from the sidelines, was probably right: “they were to be hurried away at all events, come of them after what would.”⁶⁷...

... by the time the settlers weighed anchor at Plymouth on April 9, 1787, the government’s responsibility, except for paying the transportation bill, had ended. The Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor closed its books. The link to Britain was through one man, Granville Sharp. It was not a colony, but a free and self-governing settlement which was to rise at Sierra Leone, and appropriately it was named Granville Town in Sharp’s honor. It lay in what he called the Province of Freedom. It lasted only thirty months, from the arrival of the three transports May 9, to its destruction in a quarrel between local Africans and American slave traders in December, 1789. It constituted, however, a significant beginning for what came to be the colony of Sierra Leone, important for the promises made, the hopes aroused on both sides of the Atlantic, the errors committed, the risks run and the threat it posed to the established commercial (that is, mainly, slaving) interests.
   Even with a stop at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, where Captain Thompson purchased a bullock for each ship (and where the black passengers were not allowed ashore to stretch their legs), Cape Sierra Leone was sighted within a month. The little fleet anchored in Frenchman’s Bay (soon renamed St. George’s), and the newcomers experienced their first “tornado,” a rainstorm with thunder and lightning, the same night. It was the eve of the rainy season, a poor time to arrive. The weather en route had been fine, but the blacks, weakened by prolonged confinement in ship’s quarters, insufficient fresh food and irregular habits (Sharp blamed the rum), continued to die. Of the 411 who embarked, 377 went ashore...